Am Tuesday 22 February 2005 17:51 schrieb Kimmo Koivisto:
> On Tuesday 22 February 2005 15:18, Niklas Peinecke wrote:
> > You surely live in Orwell's own country! In Germany, there is no
> > such information chain -- yet, although I think the GEZ (our tv
> > licensing institution over here) would love to have such a thing.
>> Finland is the promised land of all kind of taxes, tv licensing and
> copyright licenses from playing copyrighted music. Even churches need
> to pay licenses when people sing copyrighted hymn, tax drivers need
> to pay licenses if they have their radios on when they have customers
> etc.
> We have to pay fees when we purchase empty CD's or DVD's, because we
> could use those to record copyrighted music. We also have to pay
> copyright fees from ipods and other devices, that can contain
> copyrighted material, even digital set top boxes with hard drivers :)
>> Public television and radio organisation (YLE) is unprofitable, they
> spend more money that they can collect, so fees are increasing every
> year. Now the tv license fee is about 190 euros.
>> Welcome to Finland :)
If in exchange for those fees you become immune to the molestations of
the various content-controlling industry militias, I'd say you're
getting a good deal. In many of the other countries nowadays you're
putting one foot in prison by downloading a music file (I'm
exaggerating here, but only slightly).
Cheers,
Roland